"But now my eye sees You"
A sermon by Helen Kennedy, on Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Mark 10:46-52
Don’t you just love a good happy ending. I do, I love it when the test for that lump comes back negative. When you get the phone call from the wayward daughter telling you she is going to get married. When the Co-op gas cheque that you had completely forgotten about comes in February so you can pay off the Christmas Credit Card debt. Because you know, it all comes out in the wash, everything will turn out ok, you’ll see. So this is Job and his life, a lovely happy ending which puts right all of the misery and suffering he has had to put up with. Remembering that all of this was done to allow God to make a point, so the point has been made and God wins. As a prize for his participation Job gets double what he had in the beginning. So thank you to the editors of Job for such a happy ending.
But easy tiger, I don’t think we can get there quite that fast! Job may have begun with Once upon a time, and ends with and they all lived happily ever after but there are 40 odd chapters of mayhem and misery in between, so what are we to make of that and of God’s behaviour.
It may also be good for us to remember that Job is canonically nestled in the centre of the wisdom literature. Proverbs- Job- Ecclesiastes. Which gives us a clue we are to look for the wisdom that is contained in Jobs last recorded encounter with God.
The exaggeration of Jobs completely undeserved suffering, gives voice to the breadth of our own human sorrows, both on an ordinary and even massive scale. Job lost everything, his children, his livelihood, his health. He also loses the comfort of his theology of what and who he thought his God was, and that was important to him because at the beginning of the story we are told he had ‘instructed many’, he was a teacher of the faith. Now its all gone and Job responds in typical human fashion in despair, self pity, and outrage at what is happening to him. His friends really don’t help him with his confusion at all. But what they do, is make him think again about what and who he believes God to be, and by complaining, and lamenting and shouting at God, he keeps that relationship alive. Some would have done what his wife said ‘curse God and die’. Just give up on this God thing, it really isn’t working for you. Because the God thing was understood to be that those who are good get rewarded, and those who are not get punished. Some of us think that that is still how God works. Making these passages even more input for us to hear again.
Job is at the end of his rope, sitting in an ash heap, when finally he realises there is far more to God than he could ever hope to imagine. In that moment after he has screamed and shouted at God, shaking his fist he comes to realise that during his life he simply just heard about what and who God is to him through the schooling that he had, and even from his faith community. Now, sitting in the ruins of his life, instead of being forced into submission Job speaks of an experience of seeing what and who God is to him. He has met God in the storm of his own life, and God has remained. I think there is the wisdom! Jobs eyes are opened as he said, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know.” He sits in his ash heap of his life and sees God with him for the first time and it transforms him. It makes Job think again about what and who God is to him. Job gets up from his ash heap and gets on with his life a changed man. His encounter with God reveals a different theology and perspective of what and who, which takes Job outside of himself to become a new being in his community. That is enough for God!
The bit we miss between verses 7-9 is God talking to Job’s friends, chastising them that they had not spoken the truth about God, while Job had. Now they had better make a sacrifice and ask Job to pray for them, if they did that, God would not deal with them according to their folly! They had spoken about a false precept of cause and effect, they presumed to know how God operates, when nobody can.
It is also not insignificant that Job out of his abundance gives an inheritance to his daughters, or that the sons are not named but the daughters are! This is a changed Job, and he is changing the community or societal norms around him.
So what this passage, what this wisdom teaching offers us, is to consider for ourselves what and who God is to us, and how we can be transformed by seeing God in the ash of our lives.
Which is actually not a bad transition to say a brief word about our gospel. Blindness towards the actions of God is a theme for Mark. Certainly in this section the spiritual blindness of the disciples as to what is really going on around them is being highlighted. Peter rebuking Jesus for explaining that the son of man has to suffer and be rejected, the disciples debating about who is going to be the greatest in the kingdom, then James and John peacocking about who is going to sit on the left and right hand of Jesus, all show a blindness to the subversive nature of the kingdom Jesus has been trying to demonstrate, explain and describe for the past few years.
So then an actual blind man comes along in the crowd and calls out. The crowd desperately try to shut him up, but Jesus then asks him the same question as he’d asked the disciples, ‘what do you want me to do for you?’ The man said ‘let me see again’, then Mark’s favourite word, ‘Immediately’ the man regained his sight and followed him on the way.
In both of our readings, the emphasis on seeing God has the potential to transform a life. The disciples missed it because they were focused on the notion that Might would topple the regime, Jobs friends missed it because cause and effect was how God operated in their minds. But, seeing God in the ordinary, in the ash heap, and in those in dire need, in the least, the last and the lost, transforms our relationship with God. So I encourage us to see and seek God in the unexpected places, allow our eyes to be open and our lives transformed, knowing that there is so much we cannot know or understand. Job and the blind man push us to hold our theologies lightly, knowing that new times requires new and reformed theological expressions, ones that it is good to be open to, if we want to see transformations. AMEN